Review: Bill Chalker - The Oz Files

The OZ Files: the Australian UFO
story, Bill Chalker; Duffy and
Snelgrove, Sydney 1996.
ISBN 1 875989 04 8.

The Oz Files is a brief compendium of Australasian UFO sightings that attempts to examine these phenomena with an ‘open mind’. The author, Bill Chalker, has studied UFO accounts since the 1970s and now coordinates an organisation called The UFO Investigation Centre.

Most of the sightings in the book are referenced from local UFO literature, like Australian UFO Bulletin, and internal reports from The UFO Information Centre. The narrative follows a chronological progression from aboriginal experiences and early settlement though to the UFO saturated decades of the post-war era.

In the chapter on aboriginal UFO encounters Chalker’s open mind is at its most porous. He draws the reader through a succession of aboriginal tales that evoke the familiar pattern
of alien visitation, abduction and impregnation before coyly reminding the reader not to uproot this lore from its cultural context and impose on it our fascination with UFOs. After enthusiastically quoting an aboriginal abduction account from Rex Gilroy, Australia’s alternative archaeologist and polymath of the improbable, the author politely suggests further corroboration of his source would be appreciated. Prior to the emergence of the canonical form of the flying saucer, encounters of flying arks, ghost ships
and mysterious dirigibles were documented. Between July and October 1909 there was a series of at least four localised reports of mysterious airships in Australia and New Zealand, culminating in the Kelso airship encounter (which was later admitted to be a hoax by some of the ‘witnesses’). The inspiration for the hoax was a story called “The Perils of the Motherland” in the boys periodical Chums. This is an intriguing
prelude to later waves of sightings that coalesced with the contemporary themes of popular culture, though Chalker takes little interest in this Zeitgeist effect.

As a chemist, Chalker is comfortable disputing the purported material evidence of UFO encounters, such as Pinkney and Ryzman’s discovery of ‘alien honeycomb’ (later revealed [by Skeptics patron, Dick Smith] to be terrestrial fibreglass).

He also has a reasonable knowledge of meteorological and astronomical explanations. What is absent from the book is an analysis of psychological explanations such as mental illness, hallucinatory experiences and illusory effects.

A case in point is the 1959 Boianoi sighting from Papua New Guinea. Thirty-eight witnesses reported seeing a disc with four legs projecting out of its base and several occupants on its deck. This object appeared to be moving through the air at a height of 100 metres. A plausible explanation was that the observers witnessed a false horizon and interpreted a well lit fishing vessel as an aerial craft. Chalker is dissatisfied with this explanation because the principal witness ‘was sure that the object he saw was at a 30 degree elevation in the sky’. This kind of circular reasoning suggests a poor understanding of perceptual psychology.

In the early 1980s, Bill Chalker gained access to various RAAF files on UFO investigations. Overall, Chalker eschews government and military conspiracy theories and characterises the RAAF’s prevailing attitude as one of overt disinterest which led to investigations being conducted in a cursory manner. Although Chalker states that his aim is to apply scientific scrutiny to the research of UFO phenomena, there does seem to be a tacit approval of paranormal beliefs throughout the book. While he relegates conspiracy theorists to the fringe of UFO enthusiasts, his occasional references to paranormal explanations are made without a hint of disapproval.

While The Oz Files is not a detached and dispassionate work of scientific scholarship, it does provide an informative and referenced account of Australasian UFO reports without the fringe lunacy and conspiracy theories that characterise much of this literature.

Originally published in the Skeptic Volume 23, No. 3, page 55
(https://www.skeptics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/magazine/The Skeptic Volume 23 (2003) No 2.pdf)